reading notes

Trusting your own deepest experience
by Sharon Salzberg
ISBN: 1573223409
First, there are two things this book isn’t: dogmatic or proselytizing. I want to be clear about that, because I think there might be a tendency to assume any book about faith must be. It isn’t particularly New Agey, either. (Or maybe that’s just me, revealing my [...]

Are you indispensable?
by Seth Godin
ISBN: 9781591843160
Is this a business book? Marketing? Should it be in the (cringe) self help section? It’s tempting to say all of the above. I wrote a blog post about this book last week, describing the main ideas with this venn diagram:

So the book is about asking yourself tough questions: [...]

Using the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust
by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
ISBN: 9780470743089
The authors have turned the notion of “this is going on your permanent record” on its head: what’s on your record is something to embrace, not fear. You should seek to embrace and expose — help write your own [...]

by Sylvia Boorstein
ISBN: 9780345481313
I am not a reader of self-helpy type books. I’m not trying to cast aspersions on folks who are, though it is true my desire to make it clear I’m not generally a fan of the genre does probably have something to do with the idea that anonymous people on the internet [...]

by Lawrence Weschler
ISBN: 9781932416862
I wrote a blog post not too long after I finished reading this book pulling together examples of connections I had noticed as a result of reading it. That’s probably the best evidence I can offer that the book is worth reading: it will lodge itself in your brain and affect how [...]

On the Nature of Seeing
by James Elkins
ISBN: 0156004976
There is no such thing as “just looking”; Elkins argues persuasively that seeing is more complicated than that. As an art historian with a willingness to explore not only the metaphorical but biological underpinnings of vision, he’s in a position to know.
He considers extreme images (death, illness, nakedness), [...]

A Guide to a New Way of Working
by Anne Truitt Zelenka with Judi Sohn
ISBN: 9780470223987
I tend to be suspicious of books on web topics. The internet moves much faster than book publishing, so I worry that web books will seem stale when I read them. I think Zelenka’s book will have staying power beyond [...]

Reading, Writing, and Revolution
by Derrick Jensen
ISBN: 1931498784
I’d like to think this was the kind of book that would have given me hope had I read it when I was in high school (a crappy, rundown, stagnant place) afraid I’d be unable to get out and off to college. I’m not sure it would have made [...]

by David Weinberger
ISBN:9780805080438
Weinberger is known for his ability to write about what’s happening on the web for an intelligent but not necessarily technical audience — first with others in The Cluetrain Manifesto, and then on his own with Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He’s got a knack for figuring out what’s important about how things on [...]

by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger
ISBN: 0738204315
I first read Cluetrain when the paperback came out in 2000. I was eager to read it because it was something different, something alive, and I believed what the authors said about the internet being “inherently seditious”.
The book is widely known now by its mantra, [...]